I'm getting a lot of questions on how to enable Hebrew under maemo. I know that the fonts have been packaged already and I guess there's also an input method. It's as easy as writing an XML file for my not so broken Hildon Arabic input method.

I just don't understand why can't they be made available publicly or made known ?

I can neither host nor support them, nothing personal. It's just that I don't know Hebrew and I can't support a language I don't know!

Please, oh pretty please with sugar on top, can someone give me a URL or at least share the information so I can at least copy and paste it as a reply to the emails I'm getting ?

I was trying to package hunspell-ar for Chinook so I ended up packaging:
* hunspell (libhunspell and its development headers)
* enchant (hunspell and ispell providers but I'll disable ispell soon)
* hunspell-ar
* dictionaries-common and dictionaries-common-dev (hunspell-ar depends on them)

As for dictionaries-common and dictionaries-common-dev, they are different than the Debian ones. Yes I'm using the same source but I'm only providing the bits related to myspell. I didn't include the policy too.

* The code is UGLY. A lot of the functionality is still missing.
* No packages yet. I'll create them but my cold doesn't help much :-)
* The above screenshot is for scratchbox not for the actual device. I didn't try yet to run it on the device.
* You will also need an Arabic font. I packaged one here: ftp://foolab.org/pub/apt/pool/arabic/t/ttf-kacst/ttf-arabic-kacstbook_1.6.2+mry-1.0.1_all.deb

I know there's one provided by the browser team. It was me who did the packaging for it but I'll be providing multiple fonts soon so ttf-arabic is now a virtual package.

This is my Arabic related TODO list for maemo. It's my personal one not the Nokia employee one :-)

* katoob should be fully functional (I'm learning here). Actually I did more work today and I guess it's fine.
* Package and publish some Arabic fonts (I know there's one provided by the browser team).
* See what can be done regarding input (Low priority. Sorry to say that I don't like the HIM plugin interface).
* Check arabeyes.org apps. Is there anything useful and needs "porting" ?
* glibc/x11 Arabic locale ?
* Any suggestions ?

I'll not translate the UI for 3 reasons:
* I'm not of a translator.
* The license you agree to while downloading the OS image prevents me from doing that.
* Because we are using logical IDs in the code, we will f*** up the UI unless all of the strings are translated.

So the svn repository now contains what should be katoob 0.5.9 (Hopefully). Which can now run under maemo.
* It's not possible to input Arabic except by using the emulator or the multipress input ways (From the tools menu) and only using the hardware keyboard. Probably I'm not playing nice with gtk input methods in general.
* The right click menu doesn't work. I still need to investigate.
* Even if it does, the dict support is broken because the installed libcurl doesn't support the dict protocol (I probably need to provide custom packages).
* No spell checking yet. I should probably package or port enchant.
* The icon is not visible in either the menu or the task navigator.
* UNIX signal handlers don't work. If you shut down the device, you will lose all the unsaved documents. Seems it's not working in general also!
* The about box is broken. The only fix I can think of is a smaller icon.
* The print dialog is also messed up.
* Seems we are not playing nice with dbus. A new tab won't be opened if you try to launch the application again from the menu.
* Trying to click the input menu buttons won't work too.